Ray Anderson of Interface Inc. is a guy whose ideas really give me encouragement for the future. He shared his approach to sustainable business recently at TED Talks. Seems he experienced an epiphany in 1994, when he was called out in Paul Hawken’s book The Ecology of Commerce, as an example of the traditional “take / make / waste” method of doing business. Anderson took the criticism to heart, and began a program to completely reshape the way his carpet manufacturing company does business. Here’s what he has achieved, in his own words:

This week, TED Talks posted a presentation by Saul Griffith that pushed a lot of my personal “geek” buttons – making electrical power with kites! All of us here at ThoughtOffice have a little bit of granola-crunching hippie inside us. We’ve shared many conversations about renewable energy, and leaving the planet a little better than we found it. Now, I’ll get off the pulpit, and let you watch the video: